Ruins of Survival

Black. It was so black the girl wasn’t sure she had opened her eyes at all. The uncertainty triggered her panic, giving her a sinking feeling in her stomach. Nothing made sense. The girl began to tremble, every horrible scenario playing in her head. 

She was on a bed of some sort, with a needle injected into her hand. She whimpered and tried to take it out, but was shaking too intensely. Tears slipped down her face as she stood, holding on to the bed. The only sound was that of her bare feet on the wooden floor. The girl reached out for anything tangible, that would make her feel like she wasn’t suspended in a void. She was shaking so hard she thought she was going to fall-

Wait. She felt something metal. A railing.

After warily walking up the stairs, her fingers touched something wooden and cold. A door she thought. She felt for a handle and sighed when she touched the cool metal. Her throat felt constricted. 

Feeling that if she stayed in the room any longer she’d break down in tears, the girl turned the handle and pushed. The door creaked open, and beyond it was…

A picture of her and her family nailed to the wall. 

Her house. She was in her house. 

The girl wrapped her arms around herself and cried until she felt like she was falling apart and all that remained was fear.

It was dark by the time she had regained the strength to get up.

She was so confused. Why was she in her basement? Why wasn't anyone else there?

She got up, tired and unfeeling. It felt like the world had descended into black and white. She looked outside to see-

Nothing. Nobody was walking their dogs, nobody was honking annoying loudly as they drove past. Nothing. It was as if everyone had vanished off the face of the earth. 

The shock hit her before the terror did. 

How could so many people just disappear without a trace? Her eyes widened as she tried to ignore every thought. No. NO. They had to be okay. She didn’t know what she would do if they weren’t.

She ran to the nearby newsstand, her legs feeling like lead. She pushed the doors open so hard they crashed into the walls, but she could barely hear the sound- she was looking at the newspaper in front of her that read “VIRUS HAS DESTROYED HUMANITY IN 2080”

There was a ringing in her ears that seemed to drown out the world. A virus… how had she not known? And how could it be 2080? It was 2078, right? The girl fell to her knees.

She didn’t have enough left in her to cry, so she stared at the paper until she couldn’t see anything at all. 

They were dead.

The little boy who used to deliver the newspaper, the neighbour that used to walk by every Sunday, her family. Dead. 

The weight of their lives pushed down on her. 

Gone. Everyone was gone.

She stared at that paper until she passed out, and woke up the next day feeling nothing at all.

The girl survived the next few days on denial alone. She had taken as much food as she could carry home with her. She hadn't taken anything expensive, because that felt too much like stealing, and even though there was nobody left to chastise her for shoplifting, accepting that would mean accepting that everyone was gone, and was never going to come back. 

She also refused to face the fact that she had lost 2 years of her life. 

Was she 20 now? She supposed she was, even if it was irrelevant. 

Every step she took felt like it had been stolen. 

It should have been her. 

It should have been her.

Weeks passed, and the pain never left. Everything felt catastrophically irrelevant. What was the point, when there was nothing to live for?

In the corner of her eye, the girl saw a picture her family had taken the day she’d graduated.

There was her sister, her smile as bright as the sun. When they were younger she had been told that they looked similar, but she had never seen it. Her sister was one of those people that could light up a room just by walking into it. And now she was gone. 

There were her parents, looking down at their two daughters, unmistakable pride on their faces. Never again could she call them when she couldn’t sleep. Never again would she be able to see their undying pride when she succeeded. 

Everything was gone. Everything.

She started to shake violently.

Screaming, she picked up the picture and threw it across the room. She fell to the ground and cried until she couldn’t breathe. 

I have to find them. She thought. If they were killed by the virus, their bodies have to be somewhere. 

To the chagrin of her common sense, she stood, and for the first time in weeks, she left her house. 

The desolation of the area struck her like a tidal wave. The area had once been so full of life. Now it was empty.

She walked until walking felt impossible. Tired, the girl dropped down onto the pavement below. The silence was suffocating, until-

‘Woof!’ 

Wait, was that real? Did she hear that, or did she just imagine- 

‘Woof!’

She sprung up. Life. There was something else alive. She ran in the direction of the sound, her heart soaring. She didn't care that it was a dog. It was something. Something other than the deafening desolation she had been forced to endure. The barks got closer until she could see a beautiful German Shepherd. She shrieked in relief. If the virus only affects humans, the animals must be okay! She thought. The dog padded over to her and licked her palm, filling her with something like joy.

Wait, were those footsteps?

“Who are you?”

There was someone else? Wait, there was someone else! She almost cried as she turned around to behold a tall boy, about her age, with dark hair and dark skin. 

She wasn’t alone.

She hadn’t realized how terrified she had been at the notion of being the last of her kind. She had been so hopelessly isolated, but now… now there was someone else. Someone like her- a survivor. She wasn’t alone anymore. She ran forward and flung her arms around the stranger, tears streaming from her eyes.

She wasn’t alone anymore.

“Who are you?” the stranger asked again, taken aback by her forwardness, but not entirely against it. He was absolutely terrified that he was the last as well. He was just better at hiding it.

She let go and stepped back to look at him, failing to completely grasp the situation. The fact that she wasn’t alone had not completely sunken in yet.

‘I-’ she started, but her voice cracked from disuse.

“Maya,” she said after a moment. “My name is Maya.”

“Call me Adi” he responded quietly. His voice was shaking almost imperceptibly. 

She held her arm out, and he shook it, saying, “I suppose that makes us the last humans on earth.”

Maya didn’t know how to react. She was still recovering from the shock that she wasn’t alone. She looked at him, and whispered, “I suppose it does.”

She took him to her house and sat him down at the table, the dog padding after him. She was brimming with questions. “How did you survive?” she asked.

His eyes darkened. “I ran,” he said, in such a way that invited no further inquisition on the subject.

“Okay, then,” Maya said warily. “Did you live here?” “I’d just moved in when the virus spread,” he said. Maya frowned slightly. She would have liked to talk to him for hours, if only for the company of another human being, but he seemed to be glaring at her rather pointedly. Wincing, she asked, “Would you like to stay here?” Adi raised an eyebrow, then shrugged. “I suppose we should stick together, you and I.” Maya nodded, but then he said, “You never know, we may need to repopulate the earth.”, smiling slightly. 

So he does have a sense of humour, Maya mused. 

“Careful, I know where the knives are.” she joked, smiling back. He looked nice when he smiled.

“So where should I sleep?” he asked. Maya almost said “Anywhere” but something stopped her. “The couch,” she said, her smile gone. 

“But-” he started, but was cut off by the shadow of death in Maya's eyes. He nodded and wished her good night.

Over the next months, they had nothing to do but talk to each other. Maya told Adi about her family and pretty much every thought that materialized in her mind. He, in turn, took her out to do the most gloriously ridiculous things.

For example, he stole some spray paint and had her vandalize pretty much every building in the area, which Maya was hilariously terrible at. In fact, she was so terrible at it, that she sprayed him with pink spray paint, which was hilariously out of place in his black ensemble. To punish her for laughing, he sprayed her with green, which escalated into a full-out paint war, the dog obviously being an integral part. He even made her break into a stranger’s house and use their swimming pool to clean up.

There was, of course, the time he called Maya a "duplicitous fiend", which she sprayed him with a hose for.

Adi's mantra was, “Life is short, and if you didn’t spend it, you didn’t live it”

A few weeks later, Maya was burning through a terrible book when Adi burst into her room, a paper in his hands. Maya burst out laughing at the sight of Adi looking so shocked when his expression was usually so inscrutable. 

“What’s up?” she asked between laughs, but her smile fell when he said, “You’ll want to see this.”

It was a letter.

Written by her father a few days before he apparently had her ingest a drug that would keep her asleep for 2 years. It said that he was sorry for what he had done, but that he had done it to save her.

According to the letter, the virus had already killed over a billion people and infected billions more, her father included. To protect his family, he had decided to run away, but Maya had already contracted it. 

To keep her alive for as long as he could, he had her put into a medically induced coma for 2 years, by when he hoped a cure would have been developed. 

He had not anticipated the eradication of humanity. 

The letter said that he was sorry and that he loved her, but Maya couldn’t read further. 

Tears dropped from her eyes and fell to the page, smudging the ink. She cradled the letter in her arms and cried all night as Adi held her in his arms, whispering that everything would be okay.

“I’m not letting you” 

“You don’t exactly have a choice”

“And yet here I am, telling you not to go.”

Adi replied, frustrated by Maya’s spontaneous decision to find the bodies of her family. 

“I need to see them. They gave up everything for me.” She said, adamant. 

“At least let me come with you.” Adi pleaded, but Maya refused. 

She left before he could stop her.

It took her a day of mindless searching, but she found them in an open field. 

The bodies.

They seemed to go on forever, like an ocean of death. Each corpse was lying on its back, a labelled sheet covering it. 

So many people. So many families. 

The terror forced Maya to her knees. So many, dead. She had no right to survive while all of these people had died. She had no right to live while all these people's lives had been mercilessly taken away from them- children, innocents.

How dare she be alive?

Maya walked across the field, reading every single name, until- 

Her family. 

Maya stared at them, unable to move from the horror. She hadn't realized that she had been denying their death, but here it was. Irrefutable proof that she was never getting them back. She stared that them until they almost seemed alive.

She did not leave the field until she had read every single name on those sheets.

On her way back to her house, Maya collapsed. 

She collapsed and felt that she deserved it, for surviving when she shouldn’t have been allowed to. The world seemed to blur, with all the colours coming together to form a riot that somehow seemed to work. As her eyes closed, she thought it looked like a city.

Maya woke up in her bed, disoriented and with a raging headache. Adi, who was sitting beside her, sighed in relief.

“I tell you not to go, and you go, and when I follow you to make sure you’re okay, I find you collapsed in the middle of the road.” He said, halfheartedly. “You’d better thank me for my heroism”

“My saviour” Maya replied groggily. 

She looked at Adi, and saw… devastation? 

“What is it?” she asked, wary. 

“Fainting is… nothing”

Maya hit his arm playfully “What’s up?” 

“It’s…” he started, choking as if the words physically hurt him.

He whispered the words so softly, it was as if her not hearing them would make them untrue- “It’s the first sign of the virus.”

“I... what?” Maya gasped, almost laughing. The situation was too inane to ignore, but it did not take long for its gravity to set in. 

“How long do I have?” Maya said, so softly it was as if she was afraid of the answer.

Adi couldn’t force out the words, so he traced them on her arm, a tear slipping from his eye.

2 weeks.

No! She thought. I survive the apocalypse and meet the last remaining human on earth, just to contract the very virus I survived?

It seemed like a cruel joke.

“I’m going to die, and I’m going to take you with me” Maya breathed. 

Adi turned away slightly, refusing to meet her eyes and let her see the horror lying there.

Maya sat in her room and stared at everything until it felt like it didn’t exist. Adi sat beside her, eyes on his hands as if they held a cure.

Neither said a word all night.

I need to save him, she thought. It doesn't matter if I die, as long as he lives. He needs to survive. I need him to survive, and if I stay with him, he won't. 

I need to save him.

He needs to live.

“Hey, you wanna go raid the bank?” Adi asked, throwing around a basketball. “ We can role-play as a robber and a cop. You can be the cop.”

He had adopted a doctrine of denial of her predicament.

“Can’t” Maya replied, dreading every word to come.

“Why not? You got plans with someone else?” He asked, smiling.

“Because you need to live” She replied, as a solitary tear streamed down her face. The words felt like they were poisoning her.

Adi dropped the basketball. 

“Wait, what?” he said, horrified.

“I need you to live,” She said and took out the empty bottle of sleeping pills that she had taken from the nearby pharmacy. 

-----------

No. 

This could not be happening

She could not be killing herself to save him.

Not when he ran away from his family, leaving them to die. His life was worth nothing.

Not when he had nothing to live for but her. 

He didn’t deserve to live, much less at the expense of someone he loved so much. Someone so wonderful.

She could not be doing this. 

“I’ve already taken more than enough to finish it.” She said, but he blocked out the words. There was as incessant screaming in his ear that seemed to drown out everything she said.

“No,” he said, his voice cracking as he struggled to hold back his tears. 

“Please,” he said, his legs giving out, making him fall to his knees.

“Don’t do this,” he begged, as the tears fell to the floor. He could barely look at her.

“Don't leave me. Please.”

He was screaming now. Every word was excruciating, but he didn’t care. She needed to live.

“No!” he bellowed, so loudly that it must have been heard by the heavens.

Maya crouched down.“I need you to live.” She said softly. “ For me.”

He put his hands over his ears as if her words would cease to exist if he didn’t hear them.

“Thank you for giving me a reason to live when I had none.” She whispered. “I’m sorry. I need you to survive. Do everything you’ve ever wanted to do, and leave something for us there, will you? Live for us both” 

His voice had left him. 

“No.” he whispered, his energy betraying him.

He had nothing without her. He was nothing without her.

“Please” he whispered, even softer this time. He felt like he couldn’t breathe.

Adi looked up at her to see her mouth the words I love you, as her eyes shut and she fell to the floor, looking for all the world like she had merely fallen asleep.

He stared at her body and screamed for what seemed like a lifetime. 

She was gone, and she was never coming back.